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Nalida Besson had never eaten a salad in her life, but Dr. Joel Fuhrman’s book "Eat to Live" inspired her to change her perspective on food.

Photos Courtesy of Nalida Besson

Overweight her entire life, Nalida Besson, a self-described “junk food vegetarian” and sugar addict, lived on processed, packaged, and fried foods, and had never eaten a salad.

Despite suffering from painful gallstones and gallbladder attacks in recent years, she avoided her doctor for fear that something even more serious was wrong with her health. “My whole body hurt — even my skin,” recalls Besson, who weighed 241 pounds (lb) at her heaviest. “That’s when I became afraid.”

She had made small attempts to lose weight by cutting out soda and juice, which helped her lose 25 lb; after that, her weight loss stalled. Yet in the summer of 2013 everything changed.

“I was lying down and my son came in to talk to me,” recalls Besson, who lives in Boston and whose three children have special needs. “I felt so sick that it seemed that I was preparing him for my death. I looked at his sweet little face, and I said to myself, ‘What if I’m not here for him and for my daughters?’ I decided enough was enough and I had to make a change. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be around for my kids.”

Besson says she prayed to God for a solution and remembered that the book Eat to Live, by Dr. Joel Fuhrman, had been sitting on her nightstand for months. After she read the book, which promotes a vegan, nutrient-dense eating approach, she cleaned out her kitchen, tossing out all the chips, candy, candy bars, doughnuts, and cookies. She started eating more fruits, vegetables, beans, nuts and seeds, red and brown rice, and starchy vegetables like sweet potatoes.

Meal planning was a key to her success, so she batch-cooked bean and vegetable stews and packed salads in mason jars for lunch. She also found recipes from the Forks Over Knives cookbooks and app.

By December 2013, Besson decided to cut out sugar altogether because on the rare occasions when she decided to indulge, her gallbladder pain would return and she realized she couldn’t eat sugar in moderation. “If I had a little bit, then I kept wanting more,” she says. Instead, when she wanted something sweet, she’d have a piece of fruit or make cookies with oats, bananas and nuts, for example.

Besson also started to work out at home with fitness DVDs and in her home gym using the treadmill, elliptical, and a resistance machine five to six days a week. Within two months, she lost 15 lb and her gallbladder pain significantly subsided. By 25 months, her weight had gone down 100 lb, to about 141 lb, and she had gone from a size 24 to a size 6. “Some people don’t even recognize me,” she says.

Can a Vegan Diet Help You Lose Weight, Too?

A vegan diet is a whole-food, plant-based diet that excludes meat, dairy, and eggs. A healthy vegan diet includes plenty of colorful fruits and vegetables, beans and legumes, whole grains, nuts and seeds, and soy protein sources such as tofu, tempeh and edamame.

“When you look at the components of all these nutrients, you’re really getting what you need nutritionally, but you’re also getting more volume for your calorie dollar,” says Vandana Sheth, RDN, CDE, who is in private practice in Torrance, California, and is a national spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

A well-planned vegan diet can help you lose weight because the food choices are typically lower in calories than meat and dairy products but are still satisfying. “When you have more fiber, it does fill you up. It takes up room in your stomach so you’re not as hungry and you can’t eat as much,” Sheth says.

In recent years, vegan diets have become more popular. According to a report published in June 2017 in Report Buyer, 6 percent of people identify as vegan, up from 1 percent in 2014. “Many restaurants are coming up with alternatives that are flavorful and tasty. It’s not as difficult as it used to be,” says Sheth.

Some research backs up the benefits of a vegan diet. A study published in November 2014 in the journal Nutrition looked at five groups of people who were randomly assigned to a low-fat, low-glycemic index diet; a vegan diet; a vegetarian diet; a pesco-vegetarian diet (which allows eating fish but not meat from other animals); or a semi-vegetarian (also called “flexitarian”) diet (which involves limiting intake of certain meats or meat altogether). Researchers found that after six months, people on the vegan diet lost more weight than the other two groups by 16.5 lb.

Vitamin B12, a nutrient that is primarily found in meat and dairy, is of particular concern. In fact, a review published in December 2016 in Nutrients found vegetarians were more likely to be deficient in B12, but eating B12-fortified foods and taking a B12 supplement can help. “Interestingly, our body has the capacity to store B12, so you might not show a deficiency until a few years after you’ve stopped eating animal products,” Sheth says.

The key to a healthy, well-planned vegan diet is to make sure it’s mostly whole, plant-based foods, has an adequate amount of protein from foods like beans, lentils, tofu and tempeh, and includes B12, which can be found in fortified plant-based milks, nutritional yeast, and some breakfast cereals.

Also, people should read labels and avoid vegan treats like chips, cookies, and cakes that are high in calories and not any more nutritious than their regular counterparts. “Just because something is vegan doesn’t make it automatically healthy,” Sheth says.

Like any new plan, going vegan is a lifestyle change, so it’s important to make sure it’s sustainable. “It can be a very healthy way of eating if it’s done right,” Sheth says.

Now that the weight isn’t holding her back, Besson has tons of energy and stamina to run 5K races and keep up with her kids at amusement parks. “My whole life has just changed,” she says. “It’s more liberating [and] I don’t feel stuck anymore.”

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